Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen:
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast. Everyone, my name is Arlen and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Richard Harris who is the Founder and CEO of Black Crow AI, which delivers AI/ML infrastructure as a service to companies of any size. Black Crow uses machine learning to predict the future of key enterprise KPIs, in real-time, and activates those predictions in hyper-practical ways to improve profitability. Before founding Black Crow, Richard was the founder and CEO of , which grew to over $175M in annual revenue. Earlier in his career, he was an SVP at Travelocity, where he led Strategy, BD and Travelocity’s syndication business, which grew to over $2B under his leadership. Richard was a co-founder of Site59, an innovator in online travel technology, serving as CFO through the company’s acquisition by Travelocity/Sabre Holdings. Welcome to the podcast, Richard.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Thank you, Arlen. It’s great to be here with you.

Arlen:
Yes, and thank you for joining us. Yeah, we’re really excited to talk to you because as I was mentioning before we started recording, I was telling you, I know why you’re smiling from ear to ear with an AI company

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I’m going to go to bed.

Arlen:
because at the time of this recording, we’re in June of 2023, and it seems like at the beginning of this year, or maybe really towards the end of last year. AI just exploded. You know, it’s just like all things AI. And so it’s really starting to really change things. And, you know, today we’re going to specifically be talking about paid and own channels, marketing channels rather, and how AI can transform the just overall effectiveness. And you’re going to be enlightening us on that. And I’m really excited to see what you have to say about that. But before we do get into all that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and you know, how you did get into what you’re doing today.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure. So I started my career as a consultant, a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. And like 95% of people who are consultants, you eventually decide you actually want to do something as opposed to just tell someone else to do something.

Arlen:
Right. Right,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And

Arlen:
right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
so I left BCG with a bunch of my colleagues, actually my office maid and the woman who was in the office beside us. And we started our first tech. startup and which totally spoiled all of us because it was, it grew incredibly fast. We sold it to, uh, you know, within, uh, three years of founding it. And so I’ve been doing tech startups, um, really ever, ever since the, uh, the Genesis for black crow was really sort of watching. So I’ve been in the machine learning AI world for almost a decade now, long before it was, you know, considered to be a real thing. It was sort of a fringe and maybe vaporware. 

Arlen:
Right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And for a little while, five years ago, everyone decided they wanted to be an AI company. then that,

Arlen:
Yep.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And oops, didn’t really pan out. And I’m so sorry, my light

Arlen:
Oh, no problem.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
just went off. I don’t know.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
You know what, I’m assuming we can edit this out,

Arlen:
Oh yeah,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
yeah.

Arlen:
we can edit this

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I just want to

Arlen:
No problem.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
okay, I just want to see what.

Arlen:
Sure.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Um, yeah. So the Genesis for this company, um, uh, actually came from the last company that I co-founded where we had a little skunk works. This was in the travel industry, completely unrelated to what we’re doing here at black crow. But we had a skunk works as some very talented data scientists and data engineers, and for completely different use case, it was about early risk mitigation. Um, We started cracking some pretty tough problems in the real-time machine learning space, meaning how do you ingest massive amounts of streaming data in real-time, process it hyper-fast and create a prediction that you can push back and do all of that in about 10 milliseconds. We realized there were a bunch of areas that were not widely solved, that we knew how to solve. At the same time, we were watching how the machine learning AI market was evolving. And this is sort of pre generative AI like chat, GPT more around predictive AI, which is sort of where large enterprises first adopted artificial intelligence, which is how do you make sense of the massive amounts of data that companies generate in order to be able to predict the future of your key KPIs and then take action now to alter the course or alter those outcomes that

Arlen:
Hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
the predictions are telling you will happen. So that was really what we wanted to do, is bring the sort of what we knew was happening at the Fortune 500 level, meaning this ability to make sense of massive amounts of data and

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
change some of the key indicators inside of a company, and bring that to basically any company. So not just for the Fortune 500, but what we say internally is to the Fortune 500,000. 

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And so we had experience, we had a little bit of knowledge that… ooh, some things that people think can’t be done can actually be done at scale.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And what we started to do at Black Crow, what we’re doing now, was really bring that to a much wider audience. So even if you’re a Shopify store with $5 million of revenue, you can still take advantage of Fortune 500 grade data infrastructure and machine learning.

Arlen:
Okay, that’s awesome. Yeah, I mean, that’s really some powerful stuff there. You know, like you said, for some of the smaller businesses that aren’t, you know, you know, making the millions of dollars in revenue, but still wanna be able to take advantage of all of this data and, you know, machine learning. That’s good to know that there’s something out there like it for sure.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah.

Arlen:
Well, thank you for the background, but yeah, where I wanna start today is, as I mentioned, It’s all about AI, but today we want to specifically talk about, you know, the fact that as e-commerce is just continually evolving, what did you see? Can you describe how AI is really going to change this whole landscape of marketing and particularly in terms of paid and owned channels?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure. I think there’s two main ways. One is with predictive AI and the other is with generative.

Arlen:
Thank you.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
We focus on predictive and that’s sort of what I was saying about making sense of these massive amounts of data. And, you know, I think there’s two real areas that AI is going to change things pretty fundamentally on the predictive side.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So first is the sort of core infrastructure that enables brands to recognize their users. So if you are an e-commerce merchant and you have traffic and repeat traffic and they buy things and they sign up for your email newsletters, you now have a relationship with them. But a lot of the changes in the landscape, particularly what Apple has been doing with their various versions of iOS and also in Safari with ITP, which is the sort of tracking prevention, they’ve, and there’s a bunch of good reasons why they’re. doing that, right? It’s sort of getting rid of the weird gray zone data buying and selling, people following you all over the internet, great. But

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
it’s also what they’re doing is really attacking brands own ability to use their first party data, meaning those email addresses for people who have signed up, the fact that a user is looking for men’s wear and not women’s wear or what have you. And… Because cookies expire, those have normally been the things that brands use to identify customers when they come back. Apple is making them expire in between one and seven days. And so brands are unable to recognize their users. So they can’t personalize, they can’t trigger the normal email or SMS flows that they would trigger knowing, oh, this is Richard who came back and he has this pair of shoes in his cart that he forgot about. And… Normally that would trigger these various forms of communication. And Apple’s moves have been stopping that. And so one of the key things that we do is we provide this sort of server side infrastructure. Everything I’m describing takes exactly one click. So it may sound complicated, but we’ve made it very easy for everyone. So we sort of reestablish that ability to connect the past, the present, and the future of your users. of their behavior, of their value. And so now you can do all the normal marketing, merchandising, email, SMS that you would do. And you can also feed much better data into the platforms where you acquire customers like

Arlen:
Hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Facebook. And so that’s really about just getting that very basic infrastructure back in place the way it was in more like 2019

Arlen:
Mm hmm. Right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
before Apple made all these changes.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So that’s sort of step number one is get that first party data. house in order.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Once you’ve done that, there are so many really interesting things you can do. As I mentioned, we focus on real-time machine learning. One of the key things, for example, we do is we predict the future value of a brand’s users in real time as they’re shopping. So 20 milliseconds, 15 milliseconds after any user action, like a click or an image view or whatever, inside of your e-commerce website, we’re able to push back a prediction of exactly how likely someone is to buy or subscribe or what their future lifetime value is or are they likely to sign up for your email newsletter. So all these sorts of predictions we can now do in real time, high level of accuracy and it just takes one click to install.

Arlen:
Mm hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
that’s sort of like… We were talking about democratizing machine learning. How do you get it in the hands of not just the Fortune 500, but everyone?

Arlen:
Mm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And that sort of predictive analytics is pretty powerful.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, that’s really good stuff just to be able to now that like you said, Apple has made all of these changes and all of these browsers, I guess, at some point are going to be, I don’t know if at some point they’re going to totally eliminate cookies or the cookie tracking or at least limited,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah.

Arlen:
You know, severely. There has to be another way to be able to track people in the first party data is, you know, what it’s going to come down to for sure. So Yeah, it’s good to know that there’s there is there are some options now that are available and you guys are kind of on the forefront of that. Now with companies that are in the paid advertising space, whether it’s like the Google ads, whether it’s the social media ads, the Facebook’s, the Instagram’s, and they’re in that particular space. How do you see AI and what can you provide an example of how AI can enhance the effectiveness of paid ads and you know what type of results have you seen?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah, sure. So with that sort of ability to recognize users, which is part of our platform, right? It’s both data infrastructure and AI.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So just the ability to recognize your users, to say, oh, this is Arlen coming back, and proper event tracking. You can now push much more accurate data. It’s a product we call Smart ID. And in Paid, there’s a few different ways you can use our platform. platforms like us. But with that very fundamental user identification, user recognition, you can now push much more accurate, much more and more accurate data into the platform. So Facebook relies on understanding user behavior on your site in order to, say, use Advantage Plus or even if you don’t, in order to be able to make its algorithms work better, which say, hey, this user is someone you should target or retarget, or this user is someone that you really wanna make sure you get in front of them when we see them on Instagram.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And with this sort of server side infrastructure, again, just takes a click even though it sounds complicated, you can now send much better data to Facebook. That in turn makes your buying much, much more efficient. And so wherever you are today, and I know a lot of people have. have sort of suffered a bit over the last 18 months in social, you know, in Facebook. Wherever you are today, you can expect that to increase, your ROAS to increase by, you know, 25% or more.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So it’s pretty meaningful, especially for brands. You know, we work with a lot of brands in the Shopify ecosystem and the meta platforms, Facebook, Instagram, are a very important source of of customer acquisition for them. And when costs rise or efficiency declines in meta, it can have a real impact on the bottom line. So that can be very helpful. Then when you get into the true predictive analytics, what I mentioned before, like we can predict the future value of every user as they’re shopping. And now imagine if you knew that there’s a decile of your traffic that is not going to convert at the average 3%, but this decile, this 10% segment of your users are going to convert at 55%. And you now know that in advance, versus another decile at the low end of your traffic that maybe their conversion rate is 0.02%. And you can know that in advance because we tell you. If you think about like, okay, do you want to do anything differently with these two cohorts of people? that you know have very different future values. Well, of course, you probably don’t wanna spend anything at all on that bottom cohort, right? Because they’re just very unlikely to buy. And on that top cohort, they’re very likely to buy, you know, maybe 10 or 20 times your average conversion rate. You wanna make sure that you are getting in front of them when you have the opportunity. And so just being able to differentiate where you allocate your budget by understanding their future value, that itself is a very powerful. a very powerful tool.

Arlen:
Yeah, really, really for sure. Definitely. Um, yeah, I mean, just cause what we’re seeing now is so many brands as far as the social channels are concerned. Um, you know, of course there’s right now there is the, uh, the targeting that’s still going on and being able to follow the users from. when they’re clicking on your ad or viewing your ad on socials and then kind of go seeing them through the life cycle of your, your sales funnel, um, you know, to being able to do that. But you know, like we’re saying earlier with the cookies kind of going away, it becomes more and more difficult to do those types of things. So

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
That’s right.

Arlen:
Yeah. So is the, yeah, these definitely, I mean, these things really are big, have becoming invaluable because otherwise it’s like, how, how do you track these users when it comes down to it?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s not even, you know, it’s tracking, but it’s also just like, there’s this very fundamental sort of principle that brands own their own first party data and

Arlen:
Mm

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
zero party data,

Arlen:
hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
but also that brands are allowed to build relationships with customers, right? 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
That is just, and Apple, whether inadvertently or with… some amount of forethought and malice is breaking that bond between brands and their users and 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
they’re making it more difficult to establish relationships. 

Arlen:
Mm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And there’s certainly again, people are always balancing privacy versus personalization, right? 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
When you ask people, hey, when I show up to, you know, an e-commerce site that I’ve been to, do I want them to show me products that are relevant for me?

Arlen:
I’m going to take a few minutes to get this done

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Do few minutes, I want them to alert me about sales or items in stock that I’ve looked for before? The answer is always, yes, of course I do. I don’t wanna just be generic person, right? Cause I have a relationship with this brand. And then on the other hand, you ask them, are you, do you wanna block everything and are you very concerned about privacy? And they’ll also say yes. And so there’s a balance there, right? And brands need to strike the right balance. But I think. especially when someone has opted in and said, yes, I want to have a relationship with you. I want to get your newsletter. And I’m glad that you know the kinds of things I like so you can tailor the experience a bit for me. That shouldn’t be at risk or stopped by the behemoths like Apple. And so granted, we’re helping brands do things the way Apple wants them done. So fine, which is server side. identifier that’s owned by the brand on the brand’s technology. But still, I think that some of these mega players are really infringing on what I think is a very basic agreement that we all have, that consumers and sellers should be able to have a relationship.

Arlen:
Yeah, exactly. And you know, I kind of get the point of Apple and the whole privacy thing. But like you said, there’s two separate camps. There’s a camp where people have consented, you know. to give their information and are fine with the brands being able to personalize, customize their experience, make valid recommendation versus, you know, people that don’t want that, don’t want tracking at all costs. And so, you know, that’s fine, but it’s just, you gotta give some type of tools for those people that have.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, but what they’re trying to own identity, I mean, that’s Apple’s big master plan, right? It’s like everyone understands data is the new oil or the new gold or whatever. And Apple is not restricting itself from doing all the things that’s restricting brands and advertising companies from doing. And so I think, you know, when you fast forward, whether in the physical world, on a computer or in their, you know, metaverse goggles, they’re gonna be the one that, you know, if you’re trying to sell something to someone or build a relationship, you’re gonna have to go through Apple, right? They’re gonna be the gatekeeper and probably the toll taker of digital relationships. No worries. Yeah, no worries.

Arlen:
Okay, all right. So we’re back. So yeah, so basically, yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s a valid point as far as Apple’s concerned. They’re not restricting themselves and that’s kind of the concern. So yeah, we’ll see how everything plays out. Well, I wanted to kind of shift gears away from the cut some of the channels, the paid channels and these other first party data channels to some of the own channels specifically, email marketing. because email marketing, I think now it’s bigger than ever, whereas there was a point where people were saying email was gonna go away, now it’s not going anywhere, it’s bigger than ever. And so how is AI gonna be able to enhance these types of channels, specifically email marketing, and do you have any examples of how that enhancement works?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure. Yeah, so we’ve got a couple different approaches here, but I think some of the same principles for own channels are similar to the ones we just talked about in paid channels, which is

Arlen:
which is

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
if you want to take advantage of own channels,

Arlen:
if you want to take advantage of polish animals,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
First  you need to get people to opt in.

Arlen:
First you need to get people to opt in.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
They, to give them your mobile number

Arlen:
So give them your mobile number, their 

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
or to have users give their mobile numbers

Arlen:
chat users, their mobile numbers

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
or their email addresses to you

Arlen:
or their email addresses to you

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
so that you can engage them in various ways.

Arlen:
so that you can engage them in various ways.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And so 

Arlen:
And so,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
AI, for example,

Arlen:
yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
can help predict. So very standard in the industry today is you show up at a commerce site, you flash up a light box that says, hey, 10% off your first order if you sign up for my email newsletter. And it works, but what AI can do is really optimize that process, right? And so it turns out we can predict when a user is most likely to actually opt in. So where in the process should they see that lightbox? What should the offer be? How many times should they see it? And so it turns out that there’s all these variables around timing, placement, messaging, offer, and you can actually predict what the right combination is for every individual user. And when you get that right, your opt-in rates can just skyrocket, talking 50 to 100% higher opt-in rates. And again, that uses AI to predict individual behavior. And so that’s sort of like at the beginning of the of the own marketing funnel is just grow your list, right? Make that list of opt-in people bigger.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Then next, what can you do differently with AI and also with the sort of user recognition, smart ID that I was mentioning earlier? And if you think about it, so I have all these people opted in. And now when they come back, and you probably have a bunch of brands have flows set up, right? So cadences, meaning if I, um, if I look in an item for a long time or I come back to it, or I add it to the cart, but don’t purchase that, that might trigger, you know, an alert couple of days later saying, Hey, remember this thing you left in your cart? Don’t forget about it. Or, Oh, that item that was out of stock, it’s back, back in stock. So that would normally be triggered by behavior. on site. But then Apple is coming along and slicing through the middle of your ability to do that, because you don’t know who that user is. You don’t know it’s the person who already subscribed to your email list. Now when they leave something in the cart, you can’t do anything. You can’t send the email you would normally send.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So with that Smart ID, that user recognition product that I was telling you about, now you do know who those returning visitors are. And so you can get back to how it used to be and use all of your triggered email and SMS flows. 

Arlen:
No.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So that’s another way where you can just quite materially grow the amount of revenue coming from email and SMS. 

Arlen:
Hmm?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I think that’s important because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of folks have seen their paid channel performance, particularly social decline, you know, over the last 18 months as so much has been going on in the universe. 

Arlen:
Yeah,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
So.

Arlen:
really for sure. And then, you know, a lot of budgets are being cut. So people are starting to pull back from those paid channels and are

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah.

Arlen:
looking for other more cost-effective channels. So

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Exactly.

Arlen:
yeah, I totally get it. Now earlier, you, you kind of alluded at the fact when you were talking about some of the, um, I guess you can say the nuts and bolts behind all of this AI technology and just the term itself, I think a lot of times businesses could be hesitant in to incorporate any of this stuff into their whole marketing mix, if you will. or their strategies overall, because it has a perceived complexity. You know,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure.

Arlen:
artificial intelligence, people hear that and they, you know, they start to freeze up and figure out what to do. So how can businesses, you know, specifically smaller ones, just easily adopt and implement, you know, just a basic AI strategy that’s going to benefit their marketing strategies.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure. Well, I’d like to think that Black Crow can be helpful. So

Arlen:
Sure.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
we’ve, and I mentioned earlier, so I’ve been working in AI for quite a while. But we realized if we really wanted to bring artificial intelligence to the Fortune 500,000, not just the 500, we needed to make this super simple, one click,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
fast, cheap, and easy. That’s what I like to refer to it. And

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
so you can literally download our Shopify app. And that’s all you need to do. So there’s no technology, knowledge required, no data science, no artificial intelligence.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Everything we’ve done has been to engineer out all of the complexity. And so a lot of the AI market. is sort of tools for developers, right? Like by data scientists for data scientists. That’s not what I think the right approach is for the middle of the market, smaller businesses. There it should be AI for business users, right? It should be able to just plug in. So as easily as you can use chat GPT, which is awfully easy, you should be able to get predictive analytics, which are right at the core of the business, right? It’s an asset. that you should be owning predictions about the future value of your users or recognizing your users. That’s an asset that every brand should own and we’ve just made that incredibly easy.

Arlen:
Okay, great. That’s good to know.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And I should mention, you know, everything, everything you do, everything I’ve talked about here, all these different use cases, and there are plenty more. Um, with everything we do, you can install it. We’ll help, we’ll walk you through the process, um, of getting everything set up perfectly. You can just use it, um, for 30 days and you don’t have to trust us about anything. You can just use it,

Arlen:
Hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
see the impact on your ROAS, see the impact on your email revenue or growth in your opt-in list. And if you like it, then you subscribe. If you don’t, that’s fine too. And we shake hands and part ways.

Arlen:
Okay, well, that’s good to know. I mean, it does definitely seem simple. I definitely encourage, you know, businesses that are listening to check you guys out. Well, as we get ready to wrap things up, you kind of already alluded to the fact, as far as the predictive analysis, I wanted to kind of shift gears and pick your brain as far as predictions are concerned with overall AI,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure.

Arlen:
you know, so with these given rapid changes that are happening, you know, seems like daily right now, where do you see the future? of e-commerce marketing, you know, particularly paid and own channels with regards to, you know, how AI is going to push these things forward.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah, I mean, I just in general, I think on the generative side, when you see any sort of marketing material, it is very likely to be in part or in whole generated by

Arlen:
Right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
artificial intelligence. So the image, the text, how specific it is to you, and there’ll be privacy issues there as well. But

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
if you remember back to like Minority Report, and Tom Cruise walks into the gap, and there’s an image of Tom Cruise. telling Tom Cruise about clothes he should buy, we’re headed towards that sort of world.

Arlen:
Right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Hopefully it will still be in the physical world, but if Apple has their way, we’ll all be wearing giant goggles and it’ll be done in there. But

Arlen:
Yep.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
there are definitely privacy issues, like who has the data about me to serve me the right ad? And again, Apple wants that to be Apple, right? That’s

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
why they’re doing this because they want to be able to be that minority report. a live personalized ad.

Arlen:
Right.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
But in general, I think more and more will be created by artificial intelligence. And then the decisions that marketers can make are now going to be supercharged by real time intelligence, right? So, whereas you kind of had to fumble around in the dark and spend budgets testing things that didn’t work, you’re now going to have this very sophisticated analytics prediction and data infrastructure. very simply available to you so that you can make very fast decisions, in some cases, automated decisions based on the data, hyper fast. And that’s sort of the side of the equation that we play on. So it’s how do you reach more people with the things that they want in a cost-effective way? So I think both sides of the equation are going to have pretty big impacts from AI. But the core thing around building a brand, building a customer relationship, I think we’re always gonna need humans involved because humans understand humans.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, that’s what it comes down to. Yeah. No matter how much this technology moves forward. And if we do get to the minority report days, like you said, where we’re walking into a gap, and then we see an avatar of ourself pitching us one of their products, you know, if we ever do get to that, I mean, the bottom line comes there, there has to always be, I think, the human element there to really kind of navigate and help create that relationship. between brand and the end customer. I don’t know if there’s really any way that an art of, you know, this technology can do that any better than somebody’s experience and their overall intuition and just what they’ve been exposed to as to how they can properly sell to a customer. So yeah, I don’t think there’s gonna be anything that can ultimately replace that. Well, this has been awesome talking to you, Richard. 

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Likewise.

Arlen:
I’ve definitely learned a lot. Um, you know, I’ve had others on that we’ve talked about AI and this is definitely going to add a lot, a lot of value, uh, to the whole AI discussion for sure, as it relates to marketing. Um, so I think, uh, you know, we’re just going to be have, we’re going to have some exciting years ahead of us. I know that is 

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
That’s for

Arlen:
because

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
sure, because

Arlen:
yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow
we’re only scratching the surface. Yeah.

Arlen:
Yeah, exactly. That’s, uh, that’s the, that’s the scary thing. So, uh, yeah, we’ll see what happens. Um, But lastly, before we close things out, I always like to switch gears just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I once lived in a Buddhist monastery in northern

Arlen:
Oh, wow.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
India

Arlen:
Okay, okay. Very interesting. How did

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah.

Arlen:
that come about?

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
You know, honestly, I was hiking in the Himalayas and I met these two Buddhist monks along the trail. And we sort of traveled in parallel for a few days.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And I just got to talking to them and they were the most clear headed, compassionate, calm people I’d ever met. And when I was sort of time for us to part ways,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I asked them like, hey, I’d love to learn more and practice more. And they sort of handed me this piece of paper. And they said, go to this town.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I was in Nepal at the time, and this was northern India. And they said,

Arlen:
Yep.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
go to this town, talk to this guy, and just tell him we sent you.

Arlen:
Mm hmm.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And I did. And I lived in a little hut and followed their rituals.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And it was amazing.

Arlen:
Oh, wow. Yeah, I can imagine that’s quite a story for that definitely an interesting fun fact. I’m sure that whole experience is something that you probably never forget.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
No,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
I’m talking about it now on a podcast about AI.

Arlen:
Yeah, exactly. So it’s still there in your mind. Well, that’s some good stuff. And that’s just kind of a testament to the fact that you got to step out, you got to kind of leave your home base and your comfort zone and explore the world and because you never know who or what you’re going to run into. So

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
It’s so

Arlen:
yeah,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
true.

Arlen:
definitely. Well, Richard, before we do let you go, if you don’t mind sharing the best way for our listeners to get in contact with you if they do want to pick your brain anymore about this AI and how it can help in their marketing.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Sure, so you can send me a message on LinkedIn is probably the best way. 

Arlen:
of you.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
It’s Richard L Harris. And if you want, if you ever want to try a free demo of black crow, so all the stuff we just spoke about, you can go to our website, fill out a form and someone will be in touch.

Arlen:
Okay, awesome. Well, definitely we’ll have the direct link to your guys website and our show notes and definitely encourage people to check you guys out. And as you mentioned earlier, you also have free trial so people can

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yes, that’s right.

Arlen:
check you guys out,

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Yeah,

Arlen:
kick the tires around.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
You can try it.

Arlen:
Okay.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
And our website is black crow.ai. And yeah, once you fill the format, we’ll get you all set up and yeah, you can just use it and see for yourself.

Arlen:
All right, that sounds awesome. Well, thanks, Richard. I really appreciate talking to you. I’ve learned a lot and we’d love to have you on today, the E-commerce Marketing Podcast.

Richard Harris – Black Crow:
Thank you, Aron. It’s been a pleasure.

Podcast Guest Info

Richard Harris
Founder and CEO at Black Crow AI